Blog Challenge: Day 9

Write about one of your biggest accomplishments in your teaching that no one knows about (or may not care). 

If you read some of my previous posts, you may know that I worked on curriculum during my first years teaching at an alternative school near Detroit. The curriculum was online based and required a lot of hands-on teaching to get teachers to be able to use the tool efficiently. 

One of our biggest challenges initially was with the online platform, since we had no formal training in it and the department in charge of the platform was not communicative with us as a staff. By the end of the first year, we had identified it as the biggest headache we had dealt with throughout the year. 

I have always been a technology-minded person. I play video games in my free time, I have a husband who builds computers and we talk a lot about technology together. I tasked myself with being the link between the technology department and our school, with hopes of things running more smoothly. I met with the technology department head during the summer, had some crash course training, and was put in charge of editing and transferring our curriculum for the next year. It was a huge undertaking and I was excited to be a part of it. 

I spent hours working on our Biology and Chemistry courses to ensure they would work as a template and model for the next year, a model the other teachers could use for their courses. I transferred every single course in our school to our website for students to have access. I helped my other coworkers with issues they were having in their specific courses and continued to provide support throughout the school year. I worked with our whole staff to help solve some of the big issues from the previous year.

It was a ton of work and it was work I was not necessarily trained to do. Many of the issues were ones I needed to research and resolve on my own, but it was all work I enjoyed doing and I learned so much about not only curriculum design but also about technology integration within classrooms. 

By the end of the year, I was awarded Teacher of the Year for our building -- an award many colleagues did not seem surprised by, but it didn't really explain why. I felt like I had done a great job with my teaching job and with my students, but I knew that a portion of why I was awarded TOTY was because of all my technology work with the staff. 

That was the last year I worked in Michigan, and it was so difficult to say goodbye to the staff after having the feeling that we had traveled through the trenches together. I still have the award on my desk today and I look at it often and remember how well we worked together and how much energy I put into ensuring every educator in the building had the technology support they needed.